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Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) learns the rules of The Game.
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To say I wasn't bored with The
Game is about as rousing as I can get
— the lack of boredom-was tightly
laced with irritation.
In the first movie from PolyGram
films, Michael Douglas does one of his
clotted, grip-jawed performances as
another upscale, overachieving jerk.
What is there about Douglas that so
many people like to see him suffer?
What is there about Douglas that he
wants to? You'd think father Kirk had
used up the family's quota for several
generations.
For 128 minutes, Douglas suffers as
Nick Van Orton, a near-billionaire
manipulator of money in San
Francisco. He's all alone in the family
mansion, apart from a gentle house-
keeper (Carroll Baker). Long ago, his
father killed himself by jumping off
the roof as Nick watched, but that
isn't enough to make Nick, who could
live anywhere, wish to leave the place.
His warm wife left him, maybe
fearing she'd suffer terminal heat loss
around Nick. Frigidly obsessed with
business, he dumps a fine old publish-
er (Armin Mueller-Stahl) simply to
perk up the bottom line. Nick's impu-
dent brother, Conrad (Sean Penn),
seems to hate him, enough to lure
Nick into "the game," run by the mys-
terious Consumer Recreation Services.
All predatory work and no predato-
ry play is making Nick a dull boy.
CSR can shatter his doldrums by lead-
ing him into a dangerous maze of sur-
prises, with no game plan and few
clues.
But we sense a moral imperative —
that smug, constipated Nick is going
to get therapeutic value for his night-
mare — when a clue-dropper quotes
from the Bible (John 9:25): "Whereas
once I was blind, now I can see." For
most of the plot he acts blind, and we
can't see much further.
Nick becomes a new Job,
modern man of sorrows. It starts with
little things, like his pen bleeding ink
on his fine shirt. A waitress ruins his
suit with soup. He loses his $1,000
shoe, and a house is trashed. He's
nearly killed in a taxi, and his car is
trashed. Then, the big comedown —
the omniscient game lords fiddle with _\
his Swiss bank account (aah, those
jolly gamesters of Zurich!).
Deborah Kara Unger plays a key
game sadist, with a snarly vocabulary.
Nick is sort of excited by her, even
after a blackmail scheme involving her
threatens to ruin his reputation. But,
so what? He seems to have no friends,
nobody much cares about him. Even
his stooge lawyer (Peter Donat)
becomes a game pawn.
Director David Fincher, who
slicked up the grisly twists of Seven,
does an industrially correct job of
leading us into this maze. We're invit-
ed to suffer with Nick, yet snicker,
safe in our seats. We are nearly as con-
fused as Nick, as the plot leads coyly
into dark corners (often bathed in
blue light), and we wonder if tiny
things really matter (such as a truck
labeled Cable Repair Specialists —
CSR, like Consumer Recreation
Services).
By the time Nick is pauperized and
(the supreme yuppie migraine)